The Spanish government has progressed plans to launch a competitive auction for renewable generation and energy storage in two regions where coal plants have been retired, totalling 829MW of capacity.
The Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO) has opened up a public consultation into a competitive auction for some 829MW of grid capacity for renewable generation and energy storage projects.
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The ‘fair transition’ tender will allocate existing grid capacity to new renewable generation and storage facilities in Asturias and Galicia to replace coal plants being phased out in the two autonomous regions.
It will prioritise projects which minimise environmental impact and maximise local socioeconomic benefits, particularly around employment, training and investing the local value chain and industry.
Node capacity competitions in Asturias, one in Galicia
In Asturias, a public consultation and information phase has begun for the competition to allocate capacity to the Narcea 400kV node, where a coal plant of the same name was retired in 2020.
Some 362MW of grid capacity at the node will be made available to projects and facilities located in the municipalities of Allande, Cangas del Narcea, Degaña, Ibias, Salas and Tineo, all in the southwest of the region.
A consultation has also been launched for a competition for 59MW capacity at the 220kV La Pereda node, related to the closure process of the Mieres coal facility. Capacity will go to projects and facilities in the municipalities of Aller, Lena, Mieres, Morcín, Ribera de Arriba and Riosa.
In Galicia, the information phase has begun for a tender for 408MW of capacity at the Meirama 220kV node, where capacity has been freed up by the closure of the Cerceda coal plant. The 408MW of capacity will go to projects and facilities in the municipalities of Carral, Cerceda, A Laracha, Ordes and Tordoia.
In April, similar procedures were kicked off to provide capacity to generation and storage facilities at other nodes: Garoña 220 kV (Burgos), Guardo 220 kV (Palencia), Lada 400 kV (Asturias), Mudéjar 400 kV (Teruel) and Robla 400 kV (León). A new, 400kV substation, Maciñeira, is also being built.
MITECO added that the renewables projects deployed in the past as part of previous similar tenders for node capacity were accompanied by multiple projects from other industries (agri-food, service sector, industrial, etc), creating more jobs than were lost by the closure of the coal plant.
See MITECO’s announcement about the Asturias and Galicia consultations here, where more detailed information can be found on each of the three competitions.
The deadline for submitting feedback on the programme for all three competitions is 5 August, 2024, though it is not clear how soon the auctions could be launched.
Large-scale storage ‘on the brink’ of commerciality, PERTE programme to drive deployments
While the support provided by the above tenders appears to be more around providing existing grid capacity – a huge bottleneck to clean energy project development in general – financial support has been provided to energy storage via other schemes.
The government will provide grants covering 40-65% of project cost to nearly 2GWh of energy storage projects via the PERTE programme (an acronym which translates to ‘Spanish strategic projects for the economic recovery and transition’). Winners included projects from Iberdrola, Naturgy, Enel Green Power and Fotowatio Renewable Ventures (FRV).
That tender will drive deployments in the grid-scale energy storage market, with many of them set to come online in 2025 according to research firm LCP Delta, as shown in a chart in this article where executives from FRV and inverter/BESS company Sungrow discussed the market’s drivers and challenges.
Discussing the Spanish market with Energy-Storage.news at Intersolar Europe last month, developer and IPP Cero Generation’s storage commercial manager Patrick O’Connor said: “In Spain we are leaving space on our solar projects for storage, but we don’t want to hold up the progress of the solar, so we will run a financial close process for the PV.”
“We’re on the brink of battery projects becoming commercially viable in Spain, driven by increased volatility in the energy markets and significant reductions in battery costs. It’s clear that co-located PV and battery projects will soon be the most commercially attractive project in Spain, and we’re getting structures in place to allow us to capitalise on this in the near-term.”
